This Weblog or "Blog" contains articles, events and opinions that support capital punishment in North Carolina and elsewhere. Author(s) of the contents are exercising their rights to free speech which unfortunately is often stifled or ignored by the media.
Contrary to what you might read or hear in the news, North Carolinians should be proud that an occassional and deserved execution is allowed to proceed.
- Wayne Uber

Friday, October 18, 2013

The Innocence Project Invents False Confessions

"Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of The Innocence Project, who was in attendance, . . . did not deny Dr. Welner’s charge that The Innocence Project has falsely inflated its numbers of false confessions. Neufeld additionally revealed, in his response to Dr. Welner, that The Innocence Project also classifies cases as false confessions even when their own exonerated clients are adamant that they never confessed – because, as Neufeld asserted, “some of our clients are not reliable with what they tell us.”

"Dr. Welner demonstrated how poor scientific methodology and an anti-police agenda among declared scholars in this novel area of scientific interest result in inflated perceptions of the prevalence of false confessions.

These include false representations by The Innocence Project that the proportion of false confessions in wrongful conviction cases is 25 percent when that percentage is in actuality close to 10 percent.

Dr. Welner challenged assertions of published academics such as Gisli Gudjonsson, Saul Kassin, Richard Ofshe, Richard Leo, and Steven Drizin that confirmed false confessions are “frequent,” a “small but significant minority” of confessions, and “the tip of the iceberg.”

From studies
of observed police interrogation, studies of interrogations in jurisdictions
such as Salt Lake City, surveys of police officers, and the lack of history of
false confessions elicited by correctional psychiatrists and more, Dr. Welner
demonstrated the rarity of false confessions, though their exact incidence is
unknown.

“Is it one in a million interrogations? One in ten million
interrogations? One in one hundred thousand? We do not know. But false
confessions are tragic enough,” he asserted. “Embellishment does not serve
justice and takes away from the credibility of a legitimate concern.”

“The Innocence Project finds their clients reliable enough to assert that
they are innocent rather than freed by the good fortune of contradictory
scientific evidence,” Dr. Welner observed. “To then say that their clients are
not reliable when they say they never confessed – well, either you trust your
clients or you don’t. Objectivity does not allow forensic science the liberty of
changing a threshold of ‘reliable’ to suit the argument of the moment.”